(MENAFN- Al-Anbaa) In the aftermath of the horrific attacks in Paris, politicians and commentators appear engaged in a dangerous contest to surpass each other in doomsday predictions. On Monday, eminent Harvard historian Niall Ferguson wrote an op-ed for the Boston Globe that seemed designed to beat them all.
Ferguson begins with a graphic passage from Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire describing the sack of Rome in 410 by the Goths:
In the hour of savage license, when every passion was inflamed, and every restraint was removed . . . a cruel slaughter was made of the Romans; and . . . the streets of the city were filled with dead bodies . . . Whenever the Barbarians were provoked by opposition, they extended the promiscuous massacre to the feeble, the innocent, and the helpless.
Ferguson then asks: "Now, does that not describe the scenes we witnessed in Paris on Friday night?"
The answer is: No, it does not.
The sack of Rome in 410 saw an army of 40,000 Goths plunder the Eternal City totally unopposed. It had been more than a century since Rome had been the political capital of the Empire and it had no military or police force capable of resisting the intruders. The inhabitants of Rome were utterly helpless.
When the Goths finished systematically looting every private home and public building, they loaded up their carts and left. Though the city itself still stood, it had been completely stripped of its moveable wealth. It was the first time Rome had been sacked in 800 years and was a watershed moment in the collapse of the Roman Empire.
I do not want to minimize the horror of the Paris attack, but what happened there does not equal the sack of Rome. The people of Paris still stand. The Louvre still stands. The shops of the Champs-Élysées did not lose a single piece of inventory. The banks still have all their money.
It is one thing to be concerned about Western complacency, but to argue that a small and efficiently crushed attack is just like when Rome fell is dangerous. Raising the stakes to the level of civilization annihilation invites an irrationally disproportionate response that is all but guaranteed to make the situation worse.
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